I was born and grew up in Khabarovsk (see the map), in the Far
East of
Russia. Khabarovsk is within 20 miles
from the
Chinease border and about 1 hour flight from Japan, which is
something
I did not really
appreciate until 1989. In 1980 I moved to Novosibirsk (see the map),
where I got
my undergraduate degree at the Novosibirsk State University
in 1985 and my
PhD at the Novosiborsk Institute of Mathematics in 1988. As an
undergraduate and
graduate student I had two advisors: Samuel Krushkal and Nikolai
Gusevskii.Here is
my mathematical genealogy tree (actually, a
graph).

In 1988 I went back to Khabarovsk where for 3 years I was
working at
the Institute for Applied Mathematics. Doing mathematics there
was a
bit of a challenge since the nearest real
mathematical library was within 2 hours (in Tokyo: One hour by
plane
plus one hour by train). However having there Boris Botvinnik, Misha
Borovoi and Petya Makienko surely helped.

I left Russia for good in Fall of 1991. I spent 1991-1992 at MSRI
and
in University
of Maryland (College Park) visiting Bill Goldman.

From Summer of 1992 and until Summer of 2003 I was working at
the
University of Utah in Salt Lake City as an associate professor
and
(since 1997) a professor. In 2003 I moved to UCDavis where I
was
reunited with my wife (who was in Atlanta before that); I am
now a
professor of mathematics here. In 2007, our department was
ranked 4-th in the country in Faculty
Scholarly
Productivity. Hopefully, this means that we are
producing something useful.